Missing from the Cape

by Caitlin Galway

The girl who ran away was the mystery of Martha’s Vineyard, a tangible creation drifting in soft metaphysics. Like the books you yearn to read, can’t believe are in the library. My mother once grounded me for hiding Rimbaud under the bed, his uncensored vileness, his beauty; but he was honest, and if anything is honest it is, in its own way, profane - lasting. It is the sea mixed with the sun. And that was how it was - her mouth, her touch, her words, inexorably true between the covers of ambiguity. A mystery to be solved by simply being, a story just out of reach.

6S

Caitlin Galway is an emerging writer, and student of English literature at Queen’s University. She writes and edits for The Toronto Quarterly, and is an editor for the online literary journal Metazen. She survives almost exclusively on books, tea, and white wine. She hasn’t slept in seven years.